Is Donald Trump’s Claim Of a Rigged Election Paranoia?

Robert Reich, a Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at is pondering what will Donald Trump do with his decisive loss.

Will he go the way of Mitt Romney and Michael Dukakis?

No, the professor is convinced that Donald Trump won’t fade into the skyline. He needs it too much. “Trump needs attention the way normal people need food.” Reich writes.

“For starters,” he says, “he’ll dispute the election results. He’s already warned followers “we better be careful because that election is going to be rigged and I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”

Reich goes on to say that Trump won’t have “any legal grounds to stand on this election won’t be a nail-biter like 2000 – but his goal won’t be to win in court. It will be to sow enough doubt about the legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s election that he can continue to feed paranoia on the right.”

Paranoia? How about clear and present danger?

“The revelation this month that a cyberattack on the DNC is the handiwork of Russian state security personnel has set off alarm bells across the country: Some officials have suggested that 2016 could see more serious efforts to interfere directly with the American election. The DNC hack, in a way, has compelled the public to ask the precise question the Princeton group hoped they’d have asked earlier, back when they were turning voting machines into arcade games: If motivated programmers could pull a stunt like this, couldn’t they tinker with the results in November through the machines we use to vote?

This week, the notion has been transformed from an implausible plotline in a Philip K. Dick novel into a deadly serious threat, outlined in detail by a raft of government security officials. “This isn’t a crazy hypothetical anymore,” says Dan Wallach, one of the Felten-Appel alums and now a computer science professor at Rice. “Once you bring nation states’ cyber activity into the game?” He snorts with pity. “These machines, they barely work in a friendly environment.”

Consider this: The Aspen Institute issued a public statement:

“Our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups.”

While the left snickers along with Reich about how Donald Trump will take losing the election, all while ignoring the thousands of emails floating in cyberspace, and hacked DNC. They’ll continue to conjure up new right-wing networks from discredited and un-named sources.

In the meantime, the loss of confidence in the government’s ability to keep our most fundamental securities safe grows into a stronger support for the Trump campaign.

Do you think this year’s election has more of a chance to be “rigged” by the democrats? Or hacked by the Russians?